Tranquil Pools

After building a 16,000-square-foot home in the center of two odd-shaped lots, homeowners John and Sherry wanted to design a landscape as livable as their new interior.

Since the Atlanta landscape has many grade changes, most homes have exposed basements that lead to the backyard and pool area, meaning a homeowner has to walk downstairs before walking outside. But these homeowners wanted to exit their house on the main level to access their backyard patio and swimming pool, which posed some challenges for Scapes, the residential design/build firm the couple hired to work with their 2.5-acre space.

The project’s biggest challenge was manipulating the grade changes and controlling the retaining walls, according to Scapes’ Partner and Vice President of Design/Build Pete Wilkerson. “Across the entire space from the upper right property line to the lower left property line, there was a 50-foot elevation change,” he explains. “And the homeowners didn’t want massive retaining walls everywhere to control the grade changes – they wanted smaller 2-, 4- and 5-foot walls that didn’t steal the show from the main landscape areas.”

Along with the elevation challenges came drainage issues, which were solved by the installation of pipes and catch basins around the home.
Another goal of the project was to provide a nice view of the landscape from inside the house for the homeowners as well as provide them with large usable spaces. “So we made the water feature and pool very visible to the home’s living area via the French doors,” Wilkerson shares. “We created a lot of water movement in the 18-foot-by-36-foot pool to pull the eye back. We also installed a rounded arbor in the back to pull the eye out and make the yard feel as big as possible.”

The plant material used was elegant, conservative and meshed with the Georgian architectural style of the home – simple and southern, Wilkerson points out. Two large evergreens (cryptomeria) were used in the front of the house to scale down the columns, in addition to large 5-foot boxwoods and low foundation plantings. “We didn’t want to cover up the home, we just wanted to add a few large pieces and then stair step it down so it wasn’t overdone,” he says.

In the back, container plantings were essential to bringing color to the hardscaped areas. The homeowners asked Wilkerson to help them select containers for these spaces and the Scapes’ crew installed drip irrigation into all the pots to make them low maintenance.

Though the project totaled $600,000, the design and management fee made up $8,000, the landscape and irrigation portion of the bill was $180,000, and the rest was used for hardscape and pool construction, fencing, lighting and driveway installation. Wilkerson and his team managed seven subcontractors throughout the project’s installation.

The author is managing editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at nwisniewski@gie.net.